Academic

UNC women complain about a 6-4 female-male ratio

By Tung Yin

The NY Times has a story about how many universities, including the University of North Carolina, are seeing the social impact of "not enough guys," given the fact that their student bodies are more than 50% female.  (Apparently, Lewis & Clark's college is also fairly imbalanced.)

While I can appreciate the social problems described in the story, I can't help but laugh in a sort of curmudgeonly "when I was a child, I walked through 2 miles of snow" sort of way.  You see, I went to Caltech for college in the mid- to late 1980s,  where the male-female ratio was 8-1.  From a social standpoint, it wasn't clear that 8-1 was better than infinity.  I learned the term "glomming," which described the phenomenon of 6-8 guys standing around a single woman, usually with only one of the guys actually talking to her, and the rest just nodding their heads.  Talk about distorting behavior!

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on February 11, 2010 (boomark / email).